Writing the Novel (24 page)

For a novice writer, it would seem that an agent would be all the more desirable. He’s in daily contact with the market, knows what editor is looking for what sort of material, and can pick up a phone and set wheels in motion. What he can’t do—and this is worth stressing—is get an editor to buy a book he wouldn’t want in the first place. He can lead the horse to water or carry water to the horse, but that’s as far as it goes.

How do you get such a person? The same way you bring your manuscript to the attention of an editor. By writing a query letter of the sort you wrote to Ms. Wimpole, explaining a little about your book, detailing whatever previous writing experience you’ve had, and asking if the agent would be willing to have a look at what you’ve got.
And,
let me remind you, enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope.

The agent may already have a full house. He may not have any interest in representing the type of material you’ve written. If he’s willing to look at the script, send him a copy. If he reads it and expresses a willingness to represent your work, you’ve got an agent.

Let’s suppose you’ve managed to connect with an editor all by yourself. You’ve submitted a novel to Ms. Wimpole and she writes back that she’d like to publish it. Perhaps she presents terms. Perhaps she encloses a contract. Perhaps she asks for revisions without saying anything about terms or a contract. Perhaps….

Perhaps you need an agent
now.

You may feel it goes against the grain to seek representation now that you’ve already done the hard part of finding a publisher. But it’s at this stage of the game that not having an agent can really screw you up. Before you sign anything, before you do any further work on speculation, in short before you make any conclusive move, you should have professional counsel. The commission you’ll pay is a small price.

Sounds like a good idea. But won’t Ms. Wimpole get steamed if I tell her I don’t want to do anything without an agent?

She shouldn’t. If she’s a competent editor working for a respectable publisher, she’ll probably welcome the news; she knows it’s easier to deal with a professional agent than with an unknowledgeable and perhaps scatterbrained amateur writer. She may even suggest of her accord that you avail yourself of an agent.

Even if she doesn’t, she’d be a good person to ask advice from on the subject. I know any number of writers who selected agents largely on the basis of their publishers’ recommendations.

It’s true, though, that some publishers are more reputable than others. While all the major houses play it straight, you might wind up breaking into the business writing for some graduate of the Ring Around The Collar School of Business Ethics. You may be assured that you don’t need an agent, that the publisher’s more comfortable not dealing through agents, and you may be given the impression that insisting on an agent may blow the whole deal.

If that costs you the deal, you’re better off without it.

Where do I find an agent
—
assuming 1 don’t have an editor to recommend one?

There’s a list of them in
Writer’s Market.
That’s one sensible place to start.

If you know anybody who knows an agent, so much the better. The agents I’ve known have always gotten a large number of new clients through referrals from other clients. Any third party whose name you can conveniently use can make it easier for you to get a positive reply to your query—and that’s all connections can ever do for you. After that, the book has to sell itself.

What about reading fees?

Forget about reading fees.

Some agents charge prospective clients a fee to cover the cost of reading and evaluating their work. The rationale here is that the agent has to be compensated for his time, but more often than not the tail winds up wagging the dog. The great majority of agents who solicit reading fees barely have a professional client list worthy of the name; without reading fees, they’d have trouble swinging the monthly light bill.

As a result, you wind up paying a fee in the hope that you’ll be represented by a man who, if anything, has negative clout with the publishing industry. Furthermore, the criticism he gives you can’t be trusted, because he has a vested interest in encouraging you to keep on writing—and to keep on sending in manuscripts with checks attached.

In some instances, the fee agent is in the editing business as well. The fee’s not all he wants from you. He’ll also offer to rewrite the manuscript, for a price.

Not all agents who charge fees are quite so venal about it, and I suppose there are a few who are really just trying to cover the overhead while assembling a list of professional clients. Even so, why pay an agent when you can find another agent to perform the same task for free?

The fee agent, of course, is a sure bet. You won’t have to write him a query letter and wait with bated breath for his reply. And, after he’s read your book, you can be fairly sure of a courteous letter praising various aspects of your writing. An agent who reads your work at no charge may send it back with a brief not-for-us note.

Think about it. Do you want to pay fifty or a hundred bucks so someone’ll write you a nice letter? We’re supposed to get paid for what
we
write, not to pay for what other people write to us. Remember?

I suppose you feel the same way about subsidy publishers?

You bet.

There is some justification for paying to have your work published if you are a poet or a writer of nonfiction. For most poets, that’s the only available avenue for publication. And, since poetry doesn’t make money anyway, there’s no particular stigma attached to paying for publication.

Some nonfiction deserves publication and can be commercially viable, but it may be too highly specialized to interest a commercial publisher. This is particularly likely with regional material.

In such cases, there’s no reason why an author would be ill advised to underwrite the cost of publishing his book. I personally believe that self-publishing is a much better plan than paying a subsidy publisher to do the job for you, but that’s by the way. We’re talking about novels, and it just doesn’t make sense for a novelist to pay for publication of his book. The only possible reason for it is vanity.

The novel you publish with a subsidy publisher will not do much of anything but cost you money. It will not get reviewed in any significant media. It will not be handled by stores. It will not sell enough copies to amount to anything. It will not even do much for your vanity, really, because knowledgeable people will look at the book, note the subsidy house’s imprint, recognize it for what it is, and know that your novel is one you had to pay to have published.

You can avoid the last pitfall by publishing the book yourself, using some
ad hoc
imprint. And, if you want to have a small edition of books made up in this fashion so that you can pass out copies to friends, there’s really nothing wrong with that. Writing’s a fine hobby, and if the novel you produce turns out not to be commercial, there’s no reason why you can’t indulge yourself a little and see your work in print. You’ll still spend considerably less annually than an amateur photographer, say, would part with for equipment and film.

Self-publication’s okay, then, if you can afford it. And if you know that it’s not the road to wealth, fame or professional status.

And what is the road to all those good things?

You just keep punching. You must submit your manuscript relentlessly, shrugging off rejection and sending it on to another publisher the day it comes back. You simply cannot let rejection get you down, whether it comes in the form of a printed slip, a personal note, or a refusal to read your book in the first place. You can remind yourself that all a rejection means is that one particular person decided against publishing your book. It doesn’t mean your book stinks. It doesn’t even mean that particular editor
thinks
it stinks. And it certainly doesn’t mean
you
stink.

You can remind yourself, too, that most novels have taken awhile to find a publisher, that many smash best sellers were turned down by ten or twenty or thirty publishers before someone recognized their potential. And you can tell yourself that success doesn’t hinge upon merit alone, that the determination to keep marketing your book is equally essential if you’re going to get anywhere.

You already showed you’ve got determination. It takes plenty of it to get a novel written from the first page to the last. You’re not going to quit now, are you?

No trick, then? No handy household hints to make it easier?

One trick.

One way of taking your mind off rejection.

Get busy on another book. Get deeply involved in another book, so much so that the rejections the first one piles up won’t hurt nearly as much. You’ll be amazed, I think, by how much easier the second book is to write—and by how much you’ve grown as a result of the work that went into the first one.

One of the functions of an agent is to spare you the hassle of marketing your own work, not only because he’s better at it than you are but so that you don’t have to concentrate on two things at once. Until you acquire an agent, you’ll be wearing two hats, an agent’s peaked cap and a writer’s pith helmet. To keep the marketing process from taking your mind off your writing, make the business of getting your manuscript in the mail as automatic as possible. And, to take the sting out of the rejections your novel accumulates along the way, throw yourself into your second novel as completely as you can.

Chapter 15

Doing It Again

It’s a lot easier to begin work on a second book if some eager publisher snapped up the first one ten minutes after it left your typewriter. But it doesn’t happen that way very often. As I suggested earlier, a great many of us write first novels that turn out to be unsalable. And many who do go on to produce salable second novels—but that only happens if we get that second novel written.

There’s no reason to assume that your first novel will turn out to be unpublishable. But there’s every reason in the world to expect that it will take a long time finding its way into a publisher’s heart and onto his spring list. That time will pass much faster and be put to far better use if you spend it writing your next book.

Among other things, plunging into your next book may help you deal with the old My-Novel’s-Finished-And-I-Wish-I-Were-Dead Blues.

I almost hesitate to mention the depression that so frequently follows the completion of a novel for fear of making it a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. I’d hate to think that, having finished your book in high spirits, you’ll now go sit in the corner and sulk so you can be just like the pros. I think it’s better overall, though, to be able to allow for this sort of thing. We writers tend to regard ourselves as unique specimens of humanity, so it may be reassuring to know that one is not the first person in the world to have finished a novel and wanted to throw up.

It does indeed happen to most of us, and I’m sure it’s not limited to writers. This sort of after-work depression seems to be the typical aftermath of any arduous long-term creative endeavor. Indeed, it’s quite obviously equivalent to the syndrome known as Post-Partum Depression, the feeling of emptiness and purposelessness so many mothers go through immediately after childbirth. For nine months they’ve defined themselves in terms of this life growing inside of them. Their whole purpose has been to carry their child to term. Now the child’s born and the mother’s chore is completed, and what’s she supposed to do for an encore?

Sound familiar?

It’s a little worse for a writer. The mother’s got a cute little baby to play with, and if changing him’s a bore, there’s still a certain amount of satisfaction in having him around the house. If nothing else, everybody who sees him is going to make admiring noises. Even if the kid looks like a monkey, nobody’s going to hand him a banana. They’ll all assure the mother that her kid’s a handsome devil.

Pity the poor novelist. Nobody comes over to visit his book and bring it a squeaky toy or a cuddly stuffed animal. His friends read it out of a sense of obligation, and what praise they offer has a suspiciously hollow ring to it. Agents and editors, meanwhile, have the effrontery to tell him thanks but no thanks. His child doesn’t fit their needs at the moment, he’s assured, although this is not to say that the little brat lacks merit.

My book’s no good,
the novelist concludes.
Therefore I’m no good. Therefore I’m a failure, and therefore I’ll be a failure forever, and if I had any brains I’d blow them out. If I had the guts to do it, which I don’t, because I’m worthless. So I guess I’ll drink myself to death, or go eat worms, or really get into daytime television watching.

There’s not much point in attacking this position logically. Logic doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it. Post-novel depression is just as likely to strike when the book’s a hit, and it’s absolutely devastating when the novel scores a really impressive success.

Does that seem strange? Here’s how the writer’s mind adds it all up:

The book’s a success. Gee, that’s terrific. But wait a minute. It can’t really be that good. I know it can’t be that good, because I’m the guy who wrote it, and I’m not that good, so how good can it be, huh? Now sooner or later they’re gonna find out it’s not as good as they think it is, and where’ll I be then? And anyway, what difference does it make if it’s good or not? Because one thing’s sure. I couldn’t possibly write anything that good again. Matter of fact, I don’t think I could write anything halfway decent again. Come to reflect on it, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t write anything again, decent or otherwise. I think I’ll throw my typewriter out the window. I think I’ll throw myself out the window. I think
….

I think you get the idea.

Does this really happen? You bet it does. I’ve written more novels than I can shake a stick at—though some of them deserve it—and I still experience a letdown when I finish a book, one composed of many of the thoughts presented above. After all this time, I recognize what I feel as symptomatic of Post-Novel Depression. You would think this recognition would help, and once in awhile it does, but often it doesn’t.